Knowing why I should eat good nutritious food is not always enough for me.

When I’m seeking comfort I often turn to food and not good healthy food but food that I developed an emotional attachment to years ago.  I have an emotional attachment to starchy-salty-sugary-fatty deliciousness. I have no emotional attachment to fruits and vegetables.  I’ve never drowned my sorrows in salmon or tofu.  I have attempted to comfort myself with quinoa but got nothing from it until I fried it in butter and cheese.

I believe in the power of healthy eating and have spent the better part of my life seeking to change my dysfunctional relationship with food; I developed an eating disorder at 12 years old.  Can you imagine trying to be vegetarian in Denbigh in the ‘70’s?  At that time my Mom’s idea of a salad was either chopped iceberg lettuce dripping in a mayonnaise and sugar dressing or cabbage suspended in Jello. I had a vegetarian cookbook with all of these “exotic” ingredients that no one in the Renfrew grocery store had ever heard of: Bulgur wheat? Never heard of it. My problem was not that I wanted to be a vegetarian, my problem was I wanted to lose weight and thought being a vegetarian would achieve that so all healthy foods were just a means to an end.  Starchy-salty-sugary-fatty deliciousness was still my love, my friend, my comforter. Until is wasn’t, of course, but I refused to let go because sometimes is was.

In week 3 of our 6-part series we look at “What happens in your body….When you eat healthier.”  We all know what we’re suppose to eat to be healthy and lose the weight, the hard part is doing it, especially during stressful, boring, even happy times.  We are emotional beings; every thought and action we take has an emotional component that can directly affect the food choices we make at the time.  Most of us try and eat well. We know we feel better when we eat healthy food, we know healthy food is medicine. So why don’t we always choose healthy food? For many of us our connection to healthy food is intellectual, we need to make it emotional as well.  How do we do that?

Think back to when, and how, you developed your emotional attachment starchy-salty-sugary-fatty deliciousness.  What was going on in your life?  Did it start as a distraction tactic in the form of a cookie to numb the pain from a skinned knee? A bribe to keep you quiet during church?  A promise of a reward for good behaviour at the dinner table? Or bravery at the dentist?  As we got older we continued to self-medicate with food based on those earlier habits.  And here we are all these years later still trying to manage those attachments and it’s hard, and sometimes fruitless, work!  How can we make it easier? Can we create an emotional attachment to high-fiber/protein/good-fats food?  Of course we can!  Like other healthy habits we work to build, we have the most success when we can connect them to feelings of pride, joy, happiness and self-love.  Recognizing how great we feel after a walk, swim or practice yoga, is what really gets us off of the couch and out the door, even though in the beginning all of those activities might have simply been a means to our weight loss end. 

Maybe it’s time to start listening to our bodies. When you have acid reflux after a high fat meal that your wolfed down after a stressful day, listen to what your body is trying to tell you.  It’s telling you that your go-to comfort food no longer makes it happy.  When you mow through a can of Betty Crocker icing before bed and you wake up with a sugar hangover, your body is trying to tell you to find another way to deal with the boredom or loneliness because it’s not feeling the love from the sugar.  Time to start building a loving and comforting attachment to healthy food by focusing and feeling how good our bodies feel and hum along when we nourish it and maybe, just maybe, the next time we have a stressful moment and we automatically decide a bucket of fried chicken or a gallon of ice cream is the only thing that will make us feel better, the attachment we’ve built to healthy and delicious food will give us time to pause and make a better choice, a healthier choice.